Evaluation of the hemodynamics of untreated and stent graft-treated abdominal aortic aneurysm by computational fluid dynamics

Abstract

An abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) is the dilation of the abdominal aorta, which, if left untreated, can lead to lethal conditions such as aortic ruptures and internal hemorrhaging. One of the most common treatments for AAA is the Endovascular Aneurysm Repair (EVAR), which uses Stent Grafts (SG) to support the blood vessel. However, due to lack of hemodynamic analysis, errors are still prominent. To aid in the this problem, this study proposed an evaluation on the hemodynamics of Untreated and SG-Treated AAA. To do this, the study used a patient-specific AAA adopted from Miller et al. [J. Surg. Res. 252, 37 (2021)] as the untreated AAA. As for the SG-treated AAA, a SG was modeled by the proponents using Blender. Moreover, to have a baseline model, a healthy abdominal aorta (HAA) was also introduced as a control model. These models were imported to ANSYS Workbench 2022 R1 to be set up for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. As expected, the SG-treated AAA obtained a greater velocity reading and regulated flow pattern compared to the untreated AAA, which was observed to have a lower velocity reading and an irregulated blood flow. In conclusion, the SG model provided better hemodynamics due to its ideal geometry.